Feathered wing - how to keep feathers from colliding with eachother?
Unfortunately there is no simple solution to this. Passive rigidbodies don't do anything but collide with the active ones, while staying in place, so they won't help you there. Could try to use hinge joints with a lot of constraints (RB settings, not object constraints), but I doubt that will produce steady results (worth a shot, let me know if that works).
Not even animation nodes will get you very far I'm afraid, because they can't simulate, just animate, so they might be able to move some of the feathers, but they will probably collide with the next ones. 
The only sure-fire solution is to create your animation and then manually adjust the overlapping parts, by either making a bone for each feather and bone-parent (what I would prefer) or animating them as individual objects.